on the future

I wonder sometimes about the way we can live outside of ourselves. I can already remember this walk and your cigarette and the sound of the highway behind us. I remember it even as it is happening to us. It is cold in a December sort of way for Los Angeles which is to say it isn’t actually cold at all, and maybe I shake not because of the temperature but because of the way you talk about my future. Sometimes it looks like things are being given to me, but it feels like others are being taken away. The blanks are being filled in and it makes me nervous. My voice is not necessarily my voice at all. She is already someone else. And I’m left missing patios and the sound of my staircase in the middle of the night. It seems silly to be afraid of what is to come, like monsters under the bed. But I am.